Conservation reliant species

Conservation-reliant species are animal or plant species that require continuing species-specific wildlife management intervention such as predator control, habitat management and parasite control to survive, even when a self-sustainable recovery in population is achieved.

The term "conservation-reliant species" grew out of the conservation biology undertaken by The Endangered Species Act at Thirty Project (launched 2001) and its popularization by project leader J. Michael Scott. Its first use in a formal publication was in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment in 2005. Worldwide use of the term has not yet developed and it has not yet appeared in a publication compiled outside North America.

Passages of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) carried with it the assumption that endangered species would be delisted as their populations recovered. It assumed they would then thrive under existing regulations and the protections afforded under the ESA would no longer be needed. However, eighty percent of species currently listed under the ESA fail to meet that assumption. To survive, they require species-specific conservation interventions (e.g. control of predators, competitors, nest parasites, prescribed burns, altered hydrological processes, etc.) and thus they are conservation-reliant.

The criteria for assessing whether a species is conservation-reliant are:

There are five major areas of management action for conservation of vulnerable species:

A prominent example is in India, where tigers, an apex predator and the national animal, are considered a conservation-reliant species. This keystone species can maintain self-sustaining wild populations; however, they require ongoing management actions because threats are pervasive, recurrent and put them at risk of extinction. The origin of these threats are rooted in the changing socio-economic, political and spatial organization of society in India. Tigers have become extinct in some areas because of extrinsic factors such as habitat destruction, poaching, disease, floods, fires and drought, decline of prey species for the same reasons, as well as intrinsic factors such as demographic and genetic deterioration.

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